My great grandpa filmed it in the deserts of northern France, it gets quite hot there despite what people think. (But honestly I don’t know what it’s from).
Thought the same. Deal with microns as a scale at work and after a quick Google, spider silk is between 2.5 to 25μ and we have to use an XRF to detect that shit. This dude is slicing something that small with a knife?! I'm impressed.
years ago my shop would use spider web for surveying instrument reticles. had several bundles in an envelope. was told they came from black widow but never knew for sure. we would string up cheap david white levels and high dollar K&E theodolites with same process
With my understanding of spiders, it's likely to do with how they build webs.
Black widows make traps with strands going to and from other surfaces to cacth walking insects, whereas most common spiders that would be used on a frame like that are trying to catch flies and stuff from the air instead of the ground.
We handle mainly stuff like brake calipers, pistons, deepsea oil parts, train buffers, missiles for the MoD, motorbike gear selector shafts, nuclear parts etc! Even did some shit that went into space.
The only spiders we get have drowned in nitric acid or something, poor guys.
If a particularly fine thread was required, it was split by brushing the thread up and down with a fine sable brush. The strands were unraveled and those not desired were brushed off leaving one in position on the frame, ready to use.
Is it a bundle of individual fibers? I could imagine the knife separates the bundle then the rest is more peeling than slicing. Like string cheese but tiny and weird.
The explanation is not very clear what he does with the spider silk but based on the movement i guess he grazes the silk with the knife. So he doesn’t cut it in half but sort of stretches it which makes it thinner
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to ask “Is this fake?” about newsreels.
There had been propaganda reels released during WWII that were not honest; they wanted the enemy to be chasing technological advancements that didn’t exist.
Similarly, some were to manipulate the public, such as the campaign to get people to eat more carrots.
No the carrot thing was a bullshit explanation for why they were so good at air to air combat in the dark of night. The actual explanation is they were the first to manage to shove radar equipment into the planes.
I mean there's an important distinction between fake as in "a modern fabrication for views/ai" and "contemporary propaganda" which, true or not, is valuable history
I 100% expected it to be British propaganda that they knew would eventually be seen by the enemy and cause them to waste their time and energy trying to replicate it.
Are you aware that spider silk is stronger than steel of the same thickness? It doesn't require any specialised or hard to find resources, just grab some spiders and away you go.
The manufacturing process does require a specialised skill, but that's the only hiccup in producing these parts, according to the video.
Spider silk is perfect for this, it's light, strong, and fairly unreactive to a wide variety of atmospheric changes, especially after being coated in shellac.
Using a knife is the unbelievable part and even their source says the title is fake...
If a particularly fine thread was required, it was split by brushing the thread up and down with a fine sable brush. The strands were unraveled and those not desired were brushed off leaving one in position on the frame, ready to use.
Well the British were also known for disinformation propaganda. Like the carrots improving night time vision…lying about the source of one of their essential war time resources doesn’t seem too far out there
I mean, it's common knowledge that Britain was able to spot all the German planes comming because carrots 🥕 give good eyesight. No other reason whatsoever. Nothing to do with that secret radar technology.
My guess would be just scraping it to get it smoother and reduce any stray inconsistencies like with other kinds of natural fibers, not slicing it in half
Still have to be delicate, but not what they described
Scraping it would do the opposite, humans can't make a single line of spider silk "more smooth" by mechanically altering it. Anything we do to it is going to make it worse.
Is there a name for the accent the narrators for these old videos/radio have? I don't think I've ever heard it in content that was produced after like, 1990
Mid-Atlantic is Transatlantic and it isn’t anywhere but I’m with you now. You’re thinking of Midland and/or Atlantic. Which, yeah maybe it’s a little confusing to have such similarly named accents clustered together. Roughly Maryland through mid-Jersey, so Northern Virginia is good. They blend into Atlantic-Midland in central Jersey.
The accent diversity of the northern Atlantic coast and inner coastal regions is absurd.
This is RP, but not perfect RP. I think it's someone with a regional accent affecting RP, maybe Bristol or Somerset, somewhere where they pronounce final letter Rs.
Not sure about the South West accent but I've not lived in the region long enough to be able to tell when someone may be putting on a different accent with their own leaking through.
Almost definitely Southern/South Western rather than Eastern/South Eastern though.
My 3.5 seconds of extensive research does indeed suggest this is true.
Apparently in the US they used Black Widow thread \m/
I do have a very hard time believing a person could slice a spider thread to a third of its width.
I wouldnt have thpught even the worlds greatest surgeon could accomplish that.
There is zero possibility that the guy in that film can cut spider silk without glasses. I'm 50 and I can't see shit without readers. That guy is pushing 70.
Spider silk is tougher than kevlar (which didn't exist yet), so if you need a crosshair thread that is resilient and thin, it's probably a good choice.
Yeah it wasn't super obvious from this video, but the sights they had you could look through, but had no crosshair to pinpoint aim with, so they would take the spider silk and apply it over the far end of the sight, and you could use it as a thin crosshair
That spider gets home to his missus... You wouldn't believe the shit I've been through the last few days Brenda. Some gigantic nerd kidnapped me, took advantage of my anal secretions, fucking sliced them up and they're using my beautiful silk in guns Brenda, guns!
It was kind of jarring hearing the spider referred to as male. “Charlotte’s Web” has given me subconscious bias to think of all spiders as female — didn’t know until now.
Spider silk have the ability to be semi transparent in daylight which is critical in targeting distant targets. This gives it a prism effect of seeing lines without being obscured by darker lines by other fibers.
Jesus Christ there was even spider propaganda “the British spider is the best for it” and “taken without protest” like he was aware of his duty and sacrifice.
I mean at least it was better conveyed back then rather than just getting a man to hold a pint and be vaguely racist.
The debunked part is the claim that one side was clever and the other wasn't. Both sides were perfectly aware of the benefits and limitations of pencils. The Americans used a capitalist approach and developed a solution through competition, with the best and cheapest option winning the contract. The Soviets took a different approach consistent with their system, accepting the risks and using what was available in service of their wider goals. The real story is less about intelligence and more about different political and economic systems producing different solutions to the same problem.
Because you need a very thin line, which is resistant to moisture. Also parts of the reticle have to be movable. These days reticles are precision etched, but literal cross hairs stretched in a frame are easier and spider silk is thinner and cheaper and less likely to snap then super thin wires and literal hair.
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u/Akanash_ 18h ago
"Taken without protest from his home" said with a heavy British accent is peak irony.